Something you may find interesting is that choosing a wrong niche does not have the same sort of impact with email marketing. The reason for this is that when you have a list of subscribers, it allows for the cross-promotion of many products within an industry and ongoing communication with your prospective customers.

Instead of having "one chance" to sell one type of thing to a niche, you have the ability to recommend and promote many different styles of products; sometimes even promoting a product that is seemingly irrelevant to the niche to them.

So choosing the niche is not the most critical aspect. In saying that, we are going to show you how you can easily find niches that you can build email marketing campaigns around.

First though, we will break down the flow from choosing a niche to creating a campaign.

CHOOSE NICHE -> RESEARCH NICHE -> RESEARCH KEYWORDS -> FIND PRODUCTS -> FIND CROSS-PROMOTIONS -> CREATE CAMPAIGN

On this page, we are going to be focusing on the "choose" niche, "research" niche and the "research" keyword aspect.

Choosing a Niche: A big broad Niche vs. a Smaller Niche

People typically wonder how to find a niche. Before you go any further, you should have a quick read over the following tutorial. This will fill in the blanks on many different ways you can choose YOUR niche.

Many marketers feel that the larger the niche in terms of audience size, the greater the opportunity. Their only focus is traffic and they feel that the niches with the most traffic are those that yield the most money.

However, as you become a more skilled marketer, you realize that the niche with the most traffic is likely not even a niche. For example, weight Loss isn't a niche, it is an industry. There is a big difference.

People that build a list within the weight loss industry do have lots of opportunity for the promotion of many different products, but the audience is so vast and contains many different types of people, or "niches".

A female in her 60's is likely not going to want the same thing as a male in their 20's in terms of diet, body style, and types of programs. Thus creating a list that contains all of these types will not be 100% targeted. There is no single way to write a promotional email to encapsulate all of these people and to cater to their needs, thus a relative portion of your list will become "throw away".

However, if you built a list around "guys" that were looking to get "ripped" abs, you would have a targeted list and would be able to convey an appropriate message with a relevant tone. These people will be interested in much different products/services than a post menopause female, and your list will react to your promotions because your niche is much tighter and you have the ability to be much more relevant.

So, which would be better, the broad industry, or the targeted niche. It really depends on how experienced you are as they both present great opportunities, however by being a bit more specific you can achieve a much higher Return On Investment (ROI) than a broader niche and this is a better starting point for email marketing

The key and you will hear this again and again is RELEVANCE. Regardless of whether you are an article marketer or building an email marketing campaign, relevance is critical.

Before moving on to the researching the niche, you need to first understand relevance. Please read the following tutorial:

Understanding Relevance

Let's look at a few different examples of an Industry vs. a Niche.

Industry: Relationships
Niche: Long Distance Dating

Industry: Weight Loss
Niche: Getting Toned Abs

You can earn money taking both approaches, but it is pretty obvious which one would be easier to target.

Say for example, you are promoting to the generalized Relationship industry. What would someone on that list want? Would they want to join a dating program? Want a guide on how to attract "women" quick? Want a way to send flowers online? You have no idea and a good part of this email list will be a "throw away" for any single promotion.

Now take a more relevant email list that includes people that are interested in long distance dating. Without research, we know that these people would be interested in information and sites that help them with long distance dating, creative ways to keep dating interesting, and likely interested in technologies they can use to connect with their "love". See how much easier it is to target a list that is more niche oriented...and not quite as vast.

The more relevant you can be, the higher the conversions. Although you can build massive lists with broader audiences, a good portion of the list will not be relevant and your actual conversion ratio will suffer. When in doubt, keep your email marketing campaigns tighter to a particular niche.

There are a few sites that you can use to find out what people are asking as well. These can be helpful in researching your niche because you can get first hand ideas of problems people are having within any niche.

http://www.WikiHow.com
http://wiki.Answers.com

Keyword Research

Finding highly relevant keywords is critical to the promotion of any niche, regardless of how you are getting traffic. A great resource has been created to help you with your keyword research and in the next section, we will elaborate on this in relation to email marketing.

Tutorial: Mastering Keyword Research